What do you do when you run the UK’s second largest supermarket, with over a million visitors to your website a week and you want to the transition from your old online shopping platform to your new one to be as smooth as possible for your customers? You could close your eyes and prey that the migration will be seamless, that each of the 60,000 customers that regularly shop online miraculously adapt to the improvements? You could employ extra staff in the call centres to field the phone calls and emails that invariably accompany such a move? Or if you are aware that many questions will arise, and equally aware that many of these can be resolved at the source, you could, like Asda, allow us to bestow upon your site the virtues of a Virtual Assistant.
The Virtual Assistant solution we delivered holds many long term benefits for Asda, beyond the initial solution of guiding their customers through the new platform. It will continue to help online customers through the shopping process, ensure that any complaints or queries ranging from placing orders, delivery, missing items and product quality are fielded appropriately. It will continue to decrease the number of enquires either via phone or email that the call centres would be required to handle and perhaps, most importantly from a customer service perspective, Asda will gain priceless insight into exactly what their customers want to know while they are online and the questions they put forward in their research process. This constant supply of feedback can then be used to increase the customer experience online, whether this is through recognising and correcting navigational difficulties or identifying and dealing with any frustrations they might have. In essence, it has given Asda the capacity to monitor their customers through conversations and not just through clicks.
A number of propositions wer
e presented to Asda as to the design of the Virtual Assistant (VA) should it be live action, 3D animation or 2D? It was finally decided that 2D Vector animation would best compliment the look and feel of the new platform. But who would this Assistant be? What would they be called? What would they look like? What would they do in their spare time? Where would they see themselves in five years? Important considerations for any employer, and so the virtual recruitment process began.
Prompted by a number of considerations we put forward, and in true witness protection style, Asda created the background life and loves of “Amy”, as our VA would now be known, based on criteria that would appeal to the broadest spectrum of their customer base.
Amy is 35, married to Burt with 3 children aged 3, 7 and 11 and although born in Bingley, now lives in Royston (which is just outside Barnsley). Her hobbies include Go-Karting, crafts with the children and baking (for which she has won prizes for her apple crumbles in the Great Yorkshire Cookery Competition, lest we forget). She has a diploma in Customer Services and has been a regular shopper at Asda for years. She applied for the job so she could earn a bit of money on the side and pass on her shopping sensibly tips (doesn’t she know it’s a 24/7 role? I hope Burt can handle the kids?). And although she’ll never be rude to a customer, you’d better watch out, she can deliver the occasional cheeky comment.
So to the appearance of Amy and to find the virtual face that fits. This process was driven by our Head of Ideas, Greg, and took him and his team to places where many a man fears to tread, the inner pages of the celebrity and gossip magazines! From here we established where Amy should sit on the ‘celebrity persona scale’ and 50 faces were put forward by a model agency for the selection process to begin. These were whittled down to 10 based on the most memorable and identifiable. Keyword attributes that Amy would posses were then introduced, “mother”, “natural”, “wisdom”, “professional”, and “fun” and the remaining candidates scored against each. And so the 10 became 3 and finally 1.
The next stage was to develop the demeanour of the Amy, how would she respond to certain questions? What would she do in periods of inactivity? To capture as natural a look as possible KMP Digitata put a number of people in front of the camera and noted the subtle nuances, whether this be a physical action such as touching her hair or chin or an expression to indicate surprise or confusion. Once these had been decided upon the model, chosen as Amy, could be filmed prior to animation.
The underlying technology behind Amy is based on a sophisticated word and phrase pattern recognition system, developed by Creative Virtual, which matches pre-programmed responses in the Virtual Assistant’s knowledge base with questions typed in by users. However, it also has the ability to hold the context of the conversation, in natural language and emulate the way people interact with each other. Therefore it was essential now to establish what the most frequently asked questions would be, and the answers given, as well as creating the decision trees that would pull all other answers out of Amy’s knowledge base.
Once she had been fully programmed, fitted into her uniform, and taught how to react to all questions (of both a professional and cheeky persuasion) Amy was ready to hit the shop floor.
We’ll let you know how she’s getting on soon.
